#Donald Trump is Donald Trump's only successful product

[charlesoberonn]

The fact that there used to be a reality show where people competed to be mentored in business by professional conman and 4-times bankruptcy declarer Donald Trump, and it ran for 17 fucking seasons and only got canceled because he became fucking President of the United States.

We're living in the parody timeline.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Harris campaign kicks into high gear

July 26, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

Kamala Harris has the Trump campaign on its back foot. Whatever Trump’s advisers expected from V.P. Harris, they were wrong. Although Trump and his surrogates have tried several lines of attack, each attempt backfires as Trump offends important constituencies he needs to win. In attacking Kamala Harris, Trump is offending Black Americans, successful women, mothers raising blended families, couples trying to conceive, young people, and more. The Harris campaign has responded forcefully, using a pointed sense of humor that is refreshing and attractive to younger voters who see the internet as a battlefield of ideas.

On Thursday, the Harris campaign released a powerful television ad that was a “no-holds-barred” look at the threat to democracy posed by Trump. See The Guardian, ‘We choose freedom’: Kamala Harris campaign launches first ad. The ad is embedded in The Guardian article; I urge you to watch it. If you don’t, here is The Guardian’s description of the ad:

Released on Thursday morning, the ad opens with shots of Harris’s smiling face behind a podium, the word Kamala, the word Harris, and the American flag. The soundtrack is the beginning of Beyoncé’s song Freedom, to which Harris entered and exited her first speech to campaign staffers after gaining lightning speed momentum on the road to becoming the presumptive nominee. The ad is narrated by Harris, whose first words are, “In this election we each face a question. What kind of country do we want to live in?” She continues: “There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos. Of fear. Of hate,” she says, over shots of Trump and JD Vance. “But us, we choose something different.”

On social media, the Harris campaign has been even more aggressive. The Harris campaign took a clip of Trump imitating Kamala Harris, saying, “I’m the prosecutor and he is the convicted felon.” After Trump admits that he is a convicted felon and Harris is a prosecutor, the ad immediately cuts to a picture of Kamala Harris with her voice saying, “I am Kamala Harris and I approve this message.” The Harris campaign is showing early signs of social media savvy—just as Barack Obama’s campaign did in 2008.

The Harris campaign also went after JD Vance, who described Kamala Harris in 2021 as a “childless cat lady” who should not have an equal voice in the future of America because she does not have biological children. (Harris is a stepmother to two children with Doug Emhoff.) Thursday was “In Vitro Fertilization Day.” The Harris campaign released a statement saying, “Happy World IVF Day To Everyone Except JD Vance.” See HuffPo, Harris Campaign Wishes Happy World IVF Day To Everyone Except 1 Person.

The confidence and swagger of that ad was reflected in the Harris campaign’s immediate acceptance of debate with Donald Trump, set for September 10. But as Kamala Harris demonstrated an eagerness to debate, Trump began hedging his bets, saying he “did not like the idea” of a debate on ABC. See CNBC, ‘Let’s go’: Harris agrees to debate Trump, accuses him of ‘backpedaling’ on Sept. 10 date.

The Harris campaign also used social media to troll Trump's morning appearance on Fox News, during which Trump called Kamala Harris “garbage.” The Harris campaign issued a press release entitled Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance. The press release said,

After watching Fox News this morning we only have one question, is Donald Trump ok? Trump is old and quite weird [and] this guy shouldn’t be president ever again.

For their part, Trump and his surrogates were reduced to claiming that Kamala Harris is a “DEI hire,” a “failed border czar,” and a socialist who will destroy the economy of America.

Luckily for Kamala Harris, economic growth and border security both improved in the second quarter. On Thursday, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the gross domestic product grew at a 2.8% rate in the second quarter, well above the consensus prediction of 1.9% by economists. See USA Today, US GDP report: Latest data shows economy grew 2.8% in Q2 (usatoday.com)

At the border, crossings by immigrants dropped to their lowest level since 2020 (under Donald Trump). See CBS News, Migrant crossings continue to plunge, nearing the level that would lift Biden's border crackdown. Per CBS News,

July is on track to see the fifth consecutive monthly drop in migrant apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border and the lowest level in illegal immigration there since the fall of 2020, during the Trump administration, the internal Department of Homeland Security figures show.

My point in noting the responses by the Harris campaign is not to revel in the “zingers” and “smackdowns” that are long overdue. Rather, it is to highlight the nimbleness, swagger, and professionalism of the Harris campaign. The lightning-quick responses would be exemplary for any presidential campaign; they are stunning for a presidential campaign that is four days old.

Although it is still early, it seems clear that the Harris campaign will focus on Trump's criminality, incoherence, age, and hateful agenda. And it is doing so with a satirical edge that transfers easily into internet memes—which is an effective way to create viral messaging that reaches young people. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has been caught flat-footed, trying to ignore the awkward creepiness of JD Vance and Trump's part-time approach to campaigning.

All of this should give Democrats confidence that Kamala Harris will run a strong campaign against an opponent who will wage a vile and hate-filled counter-offensive. If the first few days of the campaign are any indication, Kamala Harris is up to the task.

Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Bill Prutt for Slate:

On Jan. 8, 2004, just more than 20 years ago, the first episode of The Apprentice aired. It was called “Meet the Billionaire,” and 18 million people watched. The episodes that followed climbed to roughly 20 million each week. A staggering 28 million viewers tuned in to watch the first season finale. The series won an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program, and the Television Critics Association called it one of the best TV shows of the year, alongside The Sopranos and Arrested Development. The series—alongside its bawdy sibling, The Celebrity Apprentice—appeared on NBC in coveted prime-time slots for more than a decade. The Apprentice was an instant success in another way too. It elevated Donald J. Trump from sleazy New York tabloid hustler to respectable household name. In the show, he appeared to demonstrate impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth, even though his businesses had barely survived multiple bankruptcies and faced yet another when he was cast. By carefully misleading viewers about Trump—his wealth, his stature, his character, and his intent—the competition reality show set about an American fraud that would balloon beyond its creators’ wildest imaginations.

I should know. I was one of four producers involved in the first two seasons. During that time, I signed an expansive nondisclosure agreement that promised a fine of $5 million and even jail time if I were to ever divulge what actually happened. It expired this year. No one involved in The Apprentice—from the production company or the network, to the cast and crew—was involved in a con with malicious intent. It was a TV show, and it was made for entertainment. I still believe that. But we played fast and loose with the facts, particularly regarding Trump, and if you were one of the 28 million who tuned in, chances are you were conned. As Trump answers for another of his alleged deception schemes in New York and gears up to try to persuade Americans to elect him again, in part thanks to the myth we created, I can finally tell you what making Trump into what he is today looked like from my side. Most days were revealing. Some still haunt me, two decades later. [...]

Now, this is important. The Apprentice is a game show regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. In the 1950s, scandals arose when producers of quiz shows fed answers to likable, ratings-generating contestants while withholding those answers from unlikable but truly knowledgeable players. Any of us involved in The Apprentice swinging the outcome of prize money by telling Trump whom to fire is forbidden. [...]

Trump goes about knocking off every one of the contestants in the boardroom until only two remain. The finalists are Kwame Jackson, a Black broker from Goldman Sachs, and Bill Rancic, a white entrepreneur from Chicago who runs his own cigar business. Trump assigns them each a task devoted to one of his crown-jewel properties. Jackson will oversee a Jessica Simpson benefit concert at Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, while Rancic will oversee a celebrity golf tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, New York. Viewers need to believe that whatever Trump touches turns to gold. These properties that bear his name are supposed to glitter and gleam. All thanks to him.

Reality is another matter altogether. The lights in the casino’s sign are out. Hong Kong investors actually own the place—Trump merely lends his name. The carpet stinks, and the surroundings for Simpson’s concert are ramshackle at best. We shoot around all that. Both Rancic and Jackson do a round-robin recruitment of former contestants, and Jackson makes the fateful decision to team up with the notorious Omarosa, among others, to help him carry out his final challenge. [...]

Trump will make his decision live on camera months later, so what we are about to film is the setup to that reveal. The race between Jackson and Rancic should seem close, and that’s how we’ll edit the footage. Since we don’t know who’ll be chosen, it must appear close, even if it’s not.

We lay out the virtues and deficiencies of each finalist to Trump in a fair and balanced way, but sensing the moment at hand, Kepcher sort of comes out of herself. She expresses how she observed Jackson at the casino overcoming more obstacles than Rancic, particularly with the way he managed the troublesome Omarosa. Jackson, Kepcher maintains, handled the calamity with grace. “I think Kwame would be a great addition to the organization,” Kepcher says to Trump, who winces while his head bobs around in reaction to what he is hearing and clearly resisting. “Why didn’t he just fire her?” Trump asks, referring to Omarosa. It’s a reasonable question. Given that this the first time we’ve ever been in this situation, none of this is something we expected. “That’s not his job,” Bienstock says to Trump. “That’s yours.” Trump’s head continues to bob. “I don’t think he knew he had the ability to do that,” Kepcher says. Trump winces again.

“Yeah,” he says to no one in particular, “but, I mean, would America buy a n— winning?” Kepcher’s pale skin goes bright red. I turn my gaze toward Trump. He continues to wince. He is serious, and he is adamant about not hiring Jackson. Bienstock does a half cough, half laugh, and swiftly changes the topic or throws to Ross for his assessment. What happens next I don’t entirely recall. I am still processing what I have just heard. We all are. Only Bienstock knows well enough to keep the train moving. None of us thinks to walk out the door and never return. I still wish I had. (Bienstock and Kepcher didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Afterward, we film the final meeting in the boardroom, where Jackson and Rancic are scrutinized by Trump, who, we already know, favors Rancic. Then we wrap production, pack up, and head home. There is no discussion about what Trump said in the boardroom, about how the damning evidence was caught on tape. Nothing happens.

We attend to our thesis that only the best and brightest deserve a job working for Donald Trump. Luckily, the winner, Bill Rancic, and his rival, Kwame Jackson, come off as capable and confident throughout the season. If for some reason they had not, we would have conveniently left their shortcomings on the cutting room floor. In actuality, both men did deserve to win. Without a doubt, the hardest decisions we faced in postproduction were how to edit together sequences involving Trump. We needed him to sound sharp, dignified, and clear on what he was looking for and not as if he was yelling at people. You see him today: When he reads from a teleprompter, he comes off as loud and stoic. Go to one of his rallies and he’s the off-the-cuff rambler rousing his followers into a frenzy. While filming, he struggled to convey even the most basic items. But as he became more comfortable with filming, Trump made raucous comments he found funny or amusing—some of them misogynistic as well as racist. We cut those comments. Go to one of his rallies today and you can hear many of them.

If you listen carefully, especially to that first episode, you will notice clearly altered dialogue from Trump in both the task delivery and the boardroom. Trump was overwhelmed with remembering the contestants’ names, the way they would ride the elevator back upstairs or down to the street, the mechanics of what he needed to convey. Bienstock instigated additional dialogue recording that came late in the edit phase. We set Trump up in the soundproof boardroom set and fed him lines he would read into a microphone with Bienstock on the phone, directing from L.A. And suddenly Trump knows the names of every one of the contestants and says them while the camera cuts to each of their faces. Wow, you think, how does he remember everyone’s name? While on location, he could barely put a sentence together regarding how a task would work. Listen now, and he speaks directly to what needs to happen while the camera conveniently cuts away to the contestants, who are listening and nodding. He sounds articulate and concise through some editing sleight of hand.

Then comes the note from NBC about the fact that after Trump delivers the task assignment to the contestants, he disappears from the episode after the first act and doesn’t show up again until the next-to-last. That’s too long for the (high-priced) star of the show to be absent. There is a convenient solution. At the top of the second act, right after the task has been assigned but right before the teams embark on their assignment, we insert a sequence with Trump, seated inside his gilded apartment, dispensing a carefully crafted bit of wisdom. He speaks to whatever the theme of each episode is—why someone gets fired or what would lead to a win. The net effect is not only that Trump appears once more in each episode but that he also now seems prophetic in how he just knows the way things will go right or wrong with each individual task. He comes off as all-seeing and all-knowing. We are led to believe that Donald Trump is a natural-born leader.

Through the editorial nudge we provide him, Trump prevails. So much so that NBC asks for more time in the boardroom to appear at the end of all the remaining episodes. (NBC declined to comment for this article.) [... So, we scammed. We swindled. Nobody heard the racist and misogynistic comments or saw the alleged cheating, the bluffing, or his hair taking off in the wind. Those tapes, I’ve come to believe, will never be found.

No one lost their retirement fund or fell on hard times from watching The Apprentice. But Trump rose in stature to the point where he could finally eye a run for the White House, something he had intended to do all the way back in 1998. Along the way, he could now feed his appetite for defrauding the public with various shady practices. In 2005 thousands of students enrolled in what was called Trump University, hoping to gain insight from the Donald and his “handpicked” professors. Each paid as much as $35,000 to listen to some huckster trade on Trump’s name. In a sworn affidavit, salesman Ronald Schnackenberg testified that Trump University was “fraudulent.” The scam swiftly went from online videoconferencing courses to live events held by high-pressure sales professionals whose only job was to persuade attendees to sign up for the course. The sales were for the course “tuition” and had nothing whatsoever to do with real estate investments. A class action suit was filed against Trump.

That same year, Trump was caught bragging to Access Hollywood co-host Billy Bush that he likes to grab married women “by the pussy,” adding, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” He later tried to recruit porn actor Stormy Daniels for The Apprentice despite her profession and, according to Daniels, had sex with her right after his last son was born. (His alleged attempt to pay off Daniels is, of course, the subject of his recent trial.) In October 2016—a month before the election—the Access Hollywood tapes were released and written off as “locker room banter.” Trump paid Daniels to keep silent about their alleged affair. He paid $25 million to settle the Trump University lawsuit and make it go away. He went on to become the first elected president to possess neither public service nor military experience. And although he lost the popular vote, Trump beat out Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, winning in the Rust Belt by just 80,000 votes.

Trump has been called the “reality TV president,” and not just because of The Apprentice. The Situation Room, where top advisers gathered, became a place for photo-ops, a bigger, better boardroom. Trump swaggered and cajoled, just as he had on the show. Whom would he listen to? Whom would he fire? Stay tuned. Trump even has his own spinoff, called the House of Representatives, where women hurl racist taunts and body-shame one another with impunity. The State of the Union is basically a cage fight. The demands of public office now include blowhard buffoonery.

Bill Pruitt wrote in Slate that Donald Trump used the N-word on the set of NBC's The Apprentice in 2004 when referring to a Black contestant (Kwame Jackson)'s chances of winning the competition by saying "would America buy a n***er winning?"

This is yet another example of Trump's long record of anti-Black racism that dates back to the 1970s.

[kp777]

Is Inequality the Key to the Climate Change Debate?

By Manuela Andreoni

The New York Times

Sept. 12, 2024

In his new book, the economist Thomas Piketty argues that the world can’t stop climate change without addressing issues of inequality.

Climate change wasn’t a big topic in the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on Tuesday night. Trump all but ignored the ABC News moderators when they asked what he would do about climate change, and Harris mostly talked about it in economic terms, talking up the Biden administration’s investments in clean energy and the new jobs they created.

But there is another economic lens through which we can look at climate change: Inequality, an issue that has been a concern for many voters in the past.

At least that’s what the French economist Thomas Piketty argues in his new book, “Nature, Culture and Inequality: A Comparative Historical Perspective,” which came out this week.

Piketty’s groundbreaking 2014 book on wealth and economic growth, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” captured the world’s attention and helped push the issue of inequality into the mainstream.

Now, in his new work, Piketty has turned his attention, in part, to climate change and the ways in which inequality could help both explain the issue and help point to solutions.

When we spoke last week, he highlighted figures that showed it isn’t just that the richest countries are the most responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change; it’s that the richest people in the world emit many times the amount the poorest do.

The top 10 percent of the richest people in the world account for almost half of global emissions, according to 2019 data Piketty drew from the last World Inequality Report. The top 1 percent account for just under 17 percent of global emissions, he found. (The report is worth a read, especially for a deeper dive into the immense carbon inequalities in North America.)

“There’s no way we can preserve the planetary habitability in the long run if we don’t address our inequality challenge at the same time,” Piketty told me.

In the 20th century, many countries, Piketty argues, were largely successful in expanding access to health care and education by taking these parts of the economy out of purely capitalist frameworks. A similar shift could help the world curb climate change and stop biodiversity loss, too, he told me.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to include nature in a book about inequality?

In order to preserve planetary habitability, it is clear that we’re going to have to change our production and consumption regime throughout the world, not only for the rich, but also for the middle class. And, like, everybody. But there’s simply no way that the middle class and lower income groups are going to accept the kind of transformation that is needed if you don’t ask for a much bigger effort from the people at the top who are typically giving lessons to the rest of the world about what we should be doing, while they themselves are taking private jets.

That sort of change sounds very difficult.

When I hear skeptics saying nothing is going to change, you know, and that attitudes toward inequality and billionaires and the current capitalist system are going to stay like that forever, I’m not very impressed. Because the magnitude of the catastrophes that we will have is going to make all of this very absurd and is going to change attitudes.

But still we should not feel that this is a unique historical challenge. We’ve had enormous social inequality challenges in the past, which we were able collectively to address.

Are you comparing environmental catastrophes to the economic crises and wars that helped increase pressure for change in the 20th century?

I think catastrophes like war and environmental catastrophe obviously can play a role, have played a role and will play a role.

But what I want to stress is that catastrophes are not necessary and sufficient. If you look in detail at what happened in terms of inequality reduction in the past, I think constructive collective mobilization was more important in the end than the extreme catastrophes.

If you look at the driver for change in Sweden, it was really more of a collective mobilization. And it’s actually quite impressive to see that Sweden until 1910 or 1920 was one of the most unequal countries in Europe, and in the world, including a very elitist political system where only the top 20 percent richest male individuals had the right to vote. There was a collective mobilization by the trade unions and social democrats to put the state capacity of Sweden to the service of a completely different political project.

So instead of registering income and wealth to distribute voting rights in proportion to income and wealth, they would register income and wealth to make people pay higher taxes to pay for health and education. The case of Sweden is the kind of episode which makes me optimistic for the future.

What has worked in the past?

You had a reduction of inequality during the last part of the 20th century. But this comes also with the partial decommodification of the economic system, in the sense that you have new economic sectors, in particular education, health and, to a lesser extent, transportation and housing, which were developed outside the capitalist logic.

I think, generally speaking, the lesson is that the building of not-for-profit systems — either straight public or through nonprofit organizations — in education, and to a lesser extent, transport, housing and energy, has been an enormous success. And it’s been part of the success of what I call social democratic societies of the 20th century. So if we look at the future, basically we have to continue in this direction.

We want to use this as a leverage to develop new sectors of economic activity outside of the profit logic.

That’s interesting. The economic argument for clean energy is that it’s sometimes cheaper than fossil fuels. But other things, like conserving forests, are always a struggle because it’s harder to make them profitable. Is that the sort of thing you’re saying we should be taking out of the profit logic system because it’s a public good?

Yes, exactly. At some point we have to replace market valuation by a sort of political valuation and democratic valuation in the sense that, at some point, we have to trust democratic deliberation, at the local, national and federal level to try to decide what’s valuable for us.

So I know some people get crazy when you say that and they say, ‘Oh, but how are we going to be able to do that?’

Well, you know, that’s what we did for education and health. We just decided that it was important for all children at age 6 and then at age 10, and then at age 15 and then at age 18 to learn about this, and that. And we didn’t let the market system decide this. And now nobody wants to go back to the previous situation. So we just have to win this sort of intellectual battle.

This is a shared New York Times article.

[ilikepjo24]

"All Taylor Swift songs sound the same 🤡"

*slams hand on table* Experiment Time! Let's test your theory and see if it's correct or not, shall we?

Your assignment is to listen to the 10 songs I'll give you back-to-back. One song from each Taylor Swift album. The songs are in order of release, meaning the first one is from her debut album and the last one is from her more recent released album. That way you can all see how much Taylor's songwriting and production elements vary even on albums that were written one after the other.

Tied Together With a Smile from Taylor Swift (self titled debut)

The Best Day from Fearless

Long Live from Speak Now

Nothing New (ft Phoebe Bridgers) from Red

Shake It Off from 1989

I Did Something Bad from Reputation

Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince from Lover

My Tears Ricochet from Folkrole

No Body, No Crime from Evermore

Karma from Midnights

I demand bonus points because none of those songs are about her love life and therefore prove, along with the fact that her songs don't sound the same, that age doesn't only write about her love life.

Tied Together With a Smile is about a friend of hers that was struggling with an eating disorder

The Best Day is a song dedicated to her mother for helping her through hard times during her childhood

Long Live is a "thank you" song for all the support she has received from her fans

Nothing New is about how media mistreats and criticizes young female artists simply for commiting the crime of being young and female

Shake It Off is Taylor saying that she doesn't let the hate of the Dads, the Brads and the Chads get to her

I Did Something Bad plays into the villain controversy surrounding Taylor Swift at that time in her career because of her beef with Kanye West

Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince is Taylor sharing her concerns about the future of America with Donald Trump as the president (Lover came out on 2019)

My Tears Ricochet is about dealing with the grief of losing an important long lasting friendship and partnership because your friend and coworker sold you out

No Body, No Crime is a lyrical story in which the protagonist suspects that her best friend was murdered by her unfaithful husband after his infidelity was revealed, and killing him in retaliation (and getting away with it too!)

Karma is about Taylor's success in comparison to Scooter Braun, a man who ferociously bullied her before stealing her entire catalogue from her. She survived.

My brother in Christ, do those songs sound the same to you? I don't think so. Especially considering how some of them don't even belong to the same genre.

Thus proven.

[gloombeauty]

halsey music is really bad. i tried to listen to some songs on spotify and it's hard to do. the only song that's nice is the tradition, you asked for this, drive and gasoline. manic is a terrible album/ how did is sell well is a miracle. i found this from the archive link you posted. interesting how she talks to fans. her vip packgaes is now close to $1k. friends with trump. nice.

The picture of Halsey's brother and dad golfing with Donald Trump:

Further proving that her family was anything but poor. Feigning poverty was part of Halsey's schtick. That's why she had that picture somewhat erased from the internet. Try googling it and you won't find it. Where you can find it is at Pretty Ugly Little Liars web archive page.

The DM between Halsey and her fan was disgusting to read. You don't talk to anyone like that much less the people who helped make you rich. Granted, fans can be a pain in the ass, but she's better off ignoring them then talking to them like that. Truth be told, VIP packages are exploitative and disgusting. I have zero respect for artists who do this. How do they sleep at night taking more money from their fans? Gross.

As for the songs you were able to like, they were written and produced by Trent Reznor and Lido. Trent did two of them on her last album and Lido did the other two from an earlier album of hers.

I heard one of the songs Trent did for her at a friends wedding. I thought it was a new Gwen Stefani song. When I was told it was Halsey and it was produced by Trent, it made total sense. What didn't make sense is why Halsey needed imitate Gwen Stefani's voice. Then again, Halsey copies Gwen's 90's wardrobe, so no shock there.

Manic's success (or non - realistic success) was due to the only hit song Halsey's ever had in her solo career - Without Me.

Without Me was released as a solo single in 2018. It wasn't part of any album. In order for Manic to come across as a success, Halsey and Capitol cheated. They took a two year old song released in 2018, and put it in the new album (Manic) which was released in 2020. How shameless is that? That's why Manic "did well" because they took all the streaming numbers and digital sales of Without Me and added it along to Manic. It's cheating. Plain and simple, it's cheating. She also used digital bundles for sales too, which now, Billboard no longer counts as sales anymore. It was ethically wrong and Billboard stepped up and said no more.

But Manic's main "sales" and "streaming numbers" simply came from Without Me's success.

Music journalist's notice too and wrote a few articles about it. Regular people on twitter too:

Can you imagine Lana taking her song Video Games and adding it into Lust For Life for sales and streaming numbers? That would be cheating.

Imagine Jack White putting Fell In Love with a Girl into Fear of The Dawn for sales and streaming numbers - in order to make Fear of The Dawn look like it sold more/had higher streaming numbers. That would be cheating.

Thankfully, Lana and Jack have integrity when it comes to their body of work, and couldn't care less about sales or being #1.

Manic would have flopped hard like Hopeless Fountain Kingdom and If I Can't Have Love - Power etc.

The sad part is, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did a brilliant job with If I Can't Have Love - Power etc. Even I ended up liking one of the songs at my friend's wedding. Mind you, I never liked Halsey. You couldn't pay me to listen to Halsey. Then here is one song that I liked because the production was so good and I thought it was Gwen Stefani. Damn you Trent.

Imagine had Trent and Atticus worked instead with Grimes or Amy Lee of Evanescence? Even with Sky Ferreira. Can you imagine how brilliant the results would have been? Imagine Trent Reznor + Grimes or + Amy Lee or + Sky Ferreira? Anyone but fucking Halsey. What a major waste of time of Trent's talent. What a damn waste. And all for what? If I Can't Have Love - Power etc. bombed/flopped so hard. It was all a waste of Trent's time and effort.

To make matters worst, Halsey allegedly doesn't even write her own songs. She's always had 6-12 songwriters per song in her albums. She allegedly lies to reporters with her "I write my own songs" hogwash, but she has a bunch of men in the studio writing her songs for her. She gets songwriting credits right along with 6-12 other people. Prolific songwriter my ass. All the songs credits can be easily googled if you're interested.

At least Trent helped her get nominated for a Grammy, which she lost. She would have never been nominated without Trent Reznor.

I'm sure the next album she's working on for Columbia Records will bomb too. What trick does she have on her sleeves this time? Is she going to throw Without Me in the new album too? How many songwriters will she need to hire to help her this time around?

[anthonybialy]

Alpha Mailed

Donald Trump is a terrible person.  He thinks he’s being complimented.  An ‘80s movie villain without the charisma of James Spader thinks he’s a bad boy, and he’s right in a certain sense.  He’ll never grasp which one.  Unpleasantness isn’t a virtue even if treated as such by pigeons too obnoxious to be pitied.  Principles remain unchanged unless your surly messiah says last week’s ally is now a loser.

Nothing embodies rugged masculinity like petty insults over refusal to kneel before him with sufficient vigor.  Wholesale compliance is crucial to being an alpha.  Ask slavish voters who think he’s awesome precisely because he’s disagreeable.

A wholly inverted take on every life aspect makes them more miserable whenever they get what they want.  That sounds delightful.  But Trump inflicts what he wants on people with decent taste whether they oppose hideous black glass on the skyline or an appalling presidential choice.

Trump may be repellant, but at least he’s ineffective.  He creates the best of both worlds otherwise.  The perpetual presidential hopeful has rather paltry accomplishments for someone who proclaims to have the most of all.  If you’re going to be that repulsive, at least achieve something noteworthy.  Seducing a commandeered party doesn’t count.

Never has someone sold more garbage to more fools.  He told you he was the world record holder.  The only consolation is by what percentage he lies about his persona, who’s surely an awesome guy.

Impressing marks as well as himself doesn’t alter actuality.  It would be far more stunning to create an item astute humans wanted, but real effective businessmen don’t need something insignificant like products.

Winning at elections treated as a success in itself by political devotees who don’t trust humans to perform useful tasks without mandates.  I am starting to wonder after a couple of atrocious consecutive presidents if obtaining 270 electoral votes means the person who does so is qualified.

Obama-style gloating shows the wrong kind of bipartisanship.  A different cult style features the same membership style.  Debt will never decrease as long as we elect Democrats or the one alleged Republican who calls every conservative a RINO.

Every single aspect is untethered from context.  Loyalty, winning, power, strength: Trump and his lackeys value anything they think makes them dominant.  The fact they’re submissive bitches just spreads misery further.

A wholesale misinterpretation of what constitutes triumph is preferred by those who don’t care for subtleties like persuasion.  The lifelong obsession with claiming others are weak is surely not projection.  Foes of nastiness as a virtue only point out difficulty in maintaining principles or completing pushups.

Trump admires aspects that bring might without the context of morality.  Worst, he owns none of these things.  The embodiment of cravenness also summarizes overcompensation.  A psychiatrist would have an easy time with the biggest mental patient ever to serve as executive spread over several terms of regular sessions.  The diagnosis is as simple as the patient is stubborn.  A clown pitchman is genuinely nasty even when doing so as shtick, which is as close as Trump gets to authentic.

None of this is funny.  Invective is presented as dully as possible.  Crude nicknames are misinterpreted as laughs by the same zealots who think making preposterous opening demands during a negotiation will flummox an enemy.  Trump has never once said anything humoerous.  He’s more likely to sell a useful good.  Fans of rather broad comedy crave the comfort of American Pie-style outrageous situations that substitute for worthwhile material.  Trying to shock is for people who can’t write jokes.  

The misfortune of encountering a Trump fan on social media neatly encapsulates the savior’s career.  The most malleably hateful are shockingly lousy at insults, which is especially pathetic considering how much practice they have.  Zombified recruits are acting like their idol, which is praise in the same sense that holding meetings in Atlantic City would provide plenty of elbow room.  Alpha males who copy the scuzzy behavior of their real fake hero are funny in a way they naturally don’t grasp.

Pointing out the obvious isn’t itself an obvious thing to do.  As example number one, people who’ve never announced on Facebook to avoid friend requests as a result of being hacked need more lectures about how phony a human trying to con them can be.  Trump’s greatest political asset aside from suckering dupes is exploiting their unwillingness to learn.

Anyone who thinks the prototypical jerk is a high achiever believes every other bit of nonsense he announced, too.  Exhausted documentarians of scumbag behavior shouldn’t have to note in 2024 what was clear in 1984.  The latter earlier year doubles as the titles of yet another book he’s never read even though he’s an expert on doing the opposite of what’s said.

Moving past thinking an arrogant prick is terrific at getting worthwhile things done would be a welcome development in human progress.  Boomers won’t take a single step.

A long history of doing the precise opposite of what he claims is tiresomely irrelevant to worshipers who take him at his word.  The scuzziest religion also reflects the most obvious political push, which is quite odd for the self-proclaimed outsider.

Blatancy is an asset, at least for those who insist upon getting tricked.  Timeshare owners who endured a freaking presidential term of his ineffective awfulness and still think acting like a horse’s ass gets things done.  It’s true if ripping them off counts.

[gemsofgreece]

You remember the dreadful situation with the 12 year old girl from Kolono who was forced into pr*stitution? Okay a movie now reminded me of it and it's called "Sound of Freedom". It's a heavy but important movie about child trafficking but there's something strange going on...cinemas refuse to release it and sabotage it like turning off air conditioning, online shows sold out places when in fact they are empty, movie glitches so people in general leave the theatre.

It's almost as if people in power like Hollywood don't want us to see it and the problem is that this movie who brings awareness to this topic is viewed as "conspiracy theory" when it's not.

I don't know when society has come to this but nowadays they try to normalise it and a small country like Greece has many evidence of it...

I had to do a little bit of research about this. I believe there must be a conspiracy theory behind all the sabotage accusations, at least up to a degree. Here's why: the film was produced by a Latin American subdivision of 20th Century Fox. Disney bought Fox and - perhaps unsurprisingly - they shelved the movie. Clearly, Disney did not want to tackle any of this. However, the filmmakers gathered donations and they were able to buy the movie's release rights back from Disney. They then approached Angel Studios, a new production studio which operates with equity crowdfunding and Sound of Freedom is only its second theatrically released movie. They are a small and new company, which explains why the film was released in few cinemas and there was not much press about it.

As for the sabotage itself, I doubt it is true because in such cases, the powerful people have a way to operate much more quickly and effectively. Either Disney would not sell the movie at all or Hollywood would have somehow prevented the movie's release from the beginning. They would certainly not wait for viewers to see half the movie and then start filling the theatre halls with smoke or whatever else is claimed in those videos. Don't forget that one who has seen half the movie has ways of seeing the rest of it by buying, renting it, streaming it or even pirating it after all. My point is, nobody is effectively prevented from watching the movie this way. If they wanted it, they would simply not allow it to be released. The Head of Angel Studios said there is no truth in such claims and that on the contrary more theaters start playing the movie ever since its surprising initial commercial success.

And again, the truly powerful do not operate so stupidly. On the contrary, they can use this to their advantage. According to Wikipedia, guys like Mel Gibson, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have all endorsed the film. Trump will also host a special screening to which the filmakers and cast are invited.

This story is unrelated to Greece but Greece is in a dire situation as proven by this crime you mentioned. Anon refers to an uncovered crime of child trafficking, when a 12 year old girl was repeatedly forced into prostitution with the parts ignorance - parts tolerance of her family. Her pimp was a friend of the family, a seemingly lawful small market owner who somehow has too many connections to wealthy people and actors.............. makes you wonder. Her case moves slow as a snail and too little information is on the press lately. 25 men have been arrested but there are rumours that there are many more and those caught were the easier targets.

[paulsebert]

With that said I do believe there have been instances in which I and my friends have engaged in some rather ugly fandom. My online persona first arose in the late 90s/early 00's during the heyday of Television Without Pity, an now mostly extinct fanfiction sub-genre called MSTings, and the writings of the late Chris Hyatte For those who don't remember him I consider Hyatt one of the internet’s great cautionary tales. During the waning days of the wrestling boom fans call “The Monday Night War” Hyatte was a genuine rock star of what we called The Internet Wrestling Community. (Now we just call them wrestling fans.) His fly by the seat of his pants style was truly hilarious and paved the way for a generation of wrestling writers. Alas Hyatt proved to be his own worst enemy as the guy had no off switch. His tendency at lashing out at wrestling personalities (most notably former WCW and current AEW commentator Tony Shiavone)  and other fans like fellow Scott Keith resulted in him flaming out quickly. He was granted chance after chance burning bridges every time. At the time of his death in 2020 he had about 440 followers on Twitter which is two less than I have now. I was one of the last people to follow him in any capacity.

In that environment started writing comic reviews for Comics Nexus and Spider-Fan. I attained a great bit of a following for my reviews of Daniel Way's Venom, a book that I still consider one of the all-time hilariously bad comics of the era. Years later I met Daniel Way at a comic convention after he had largely redeemed his reputation with a successful run on Deadpool. As a young writer Way was in a position by Marvel management where almost ANY writer was doomed to fail. Basically Marvel signed him to write a new Venom comic only to be informed he couldn't use Eddie Brock. Way set out to write a horror comic inspired by The Thing only to be informed that it was going to be part of a PG-rated comics line aimed at Manga readers. When the series became the highest selling book in the fledgling Tsunami line by sheer virtue of being the first solo Venom comic released in several years Marvel asked him to shoehorn Wolverine (and subsequent guest stars) into the story at which point Way was like “sure why not.”  

Flash forward a decade later. Once again “angry reviewers” are in vogue as The Nostalgia Critic is at peak popularity as is Red Letter Media's Mr. Plinkett character. Even CinemaSins hadn't devolved into the complete clickbait that it is today. Marvel comics debuts a book called Avengers Arena which teenage heroes from several previous books: Avengers Academy, Sentinel, and Runaways were first to duel to the death by Arcade who very abruptly went from Marvel's most fun villains to least fun villains. It was a shameless Hunger Games cash-in that was one of the most thoroughly unpleasant comics I've ever read.  I started blogging on Tumblr as a way of venting and it brought me a bit of catharsis.

However with a decade of hindsight I realize that I was probably too hard on writer Dennis Hopeless. Remember Hopeless’ original pitch for the book was a new version of Excalibur consisting of teenagers mentored by Captain Britain. It simply wasn't the book he had wanted to write but the book Marvel editorial wanted. He was in a lose/lose situation. It was only a run on Spider-Woman that was generally well regarded and a WWE tie-in Comic that was much better than the actual WWE television product that I really appreciated how talented he was. Like Way before him he was just a guy doing a job in a lose-lose situation.

I stopped doing my “Worst Comics of the 2010s'' series around the time that Marvel's Secret Empire event came out. The story was largely the victim of terrible and I mean TERRIBLE timing. The people involved didn’t predict the rise of Donald Trump and just how quickly everything would go to shit. In 2015 “dude what if Captain America was like the absolute worst” villain must have seemed like a can't miss idea. In 2016 it was a heart-breaking reminder of the country's wounded psyche and in its promotion of the event Marvel basically left writer Nick Spencer to be hung out to dry. While I find Spencer's body of work to be staggeringly uneven, he was ultimately just another work for hire talent in over his head.  With the benefit of hindsight I would have handled things a lot differently. 

With years of hindsight I probably would have voiced my views differently. It's tempting to blame the current abysmal state of comics discussion on the endless cycle of corporate reboots and gimmicks or reprehensible movements like “Comics Gate” but the roots are much deeper. In fact in some ways it might have been worse. Over on his blog Mark Evanier talked about how Mark Robbins became one of the most controversial Batman artists of his day simply because he didn't draw like Neal Adams. As hard as it might be to believe there was a generation of comics fans who called Jack Kirby “Jack the Hack” because they didn't like his later works like Machine Man and The Eternals. Then you have the whole sad backlash to Ron Marz and the H.E.A.T fan movement. 

It is too tempting to write creators off without looking at their whole body of work. Steve Englehart is simultaneously one of the most important comic creators of his era AND the writer of the hilariously clueless New Guardians. I dislike many of the comics Brian Michael Bendis has written but I respect the importance of Ultimate Spider-Man and still look back fondly on his Daredevil run. Howard Mackie who became fandom's shorthand for “Hack” because of his Spider-Man runs recently made a comeback of sorts for Marvel on a Danny Ketch: Ghost Rider-Mini series and having read the first two issues it's a lot of fun! I'm rooting for him.

I want people to know that I am monitoring the situation closely. I understand the concern but I also do not want to cut anyone off unless I absolutely have to. I am content to focus on my own conduct before pointing at others.  For now I simply ask fans to treat comic creators like human beings and wish to lead by example. I'm not against a little well placed anger or even a tiny  bit mean-spirited humor but I'm just going to be more careful in how I wield it. I haven't written much about comics as of late due to my work/life schedule BUT when I get around to it I'm going to try to be a lot more respectful in my own writing. I simply ask others to do the same.

[buzzdixonwriter]

Michael Reaves R.I.P.

Of the many, many memorable moments I shared with Michael Reaves, few better sum up the man than participating with him as he battled Fred Silverman and Hideo Takayashiki for the integrity of The Mighty Orbots.

You could well cite this as a quixotic quest, attempting to bring as much skill and intelligence to a Japanese / U.S. co-production that never gained the traction it should, a one season wonder that faded from the memory of all except the most dedicated animation fans.

Michael would certainly have been forgiven for not fighting to the last bloody inch to make the show as good as he possibly could, especially in the face of a Japanese co-story editor who felt dishonored at having to share duties with an American and then having to face off against Silverman, a network executive best described as the Donald Trump of television.

Takayashiki could speak English and Michael knew this, but it was a point of honor to him not to communicate directly with any American writers.

We had a trio of female Japanese interpreters working for TMS at the time, and one of them drew the unpleasant short straw of having to translate the story sessions between Michael and Takayashiki.

The sessions, which took place in the TMS conference room with the Japanese and Americans sitting on opposite sides of a long executive table only slightly shorter than the flight deck of the IJN Hiryū, would typically start with Takayashiki wanting some change to bring the story being discussed more in line with Japanese sensibilities. 

The poor lady translator would relay this in a soft, conciliatory tone.

Michael, knowing the series’ success hinged on it being a hit in the U.S., would resist, testily citing why the suggested change didn’t fit with the way Americans liked their cartoons. 

The poor lady translator would relay his response in a soft, conciliatory tone, even though Takayashiki understood what Michael said.

Takayashiki would regretfully (or so the translator said) disagree with Michael.  Michael -- who like myself was a disciple of the Harlan Ellison school of fight long, fight loud, fight hard for your story – would respond somewhat…ah…forcefully.

The poor lady translator would relay this in a soft, conciliatory tone.

Takayashiki would reply in a tone somewhat akin to Toshiro Mifune wading into a yakuza gang.

…and the poor lady translator would relay this in a soft, conciliatory tone.

(Little wonder this translator quit mid-season to serve as a translator for an international commission attempting to hammer out a fishing treaty between the U.S., Russia, and Japan; that must have seemed awfully relaxing after dealing with Orbots story sessions!)

And if you thought that was fun, hoo-boy!  Stick around for the second part of our doubleheader, a story session with Fred Silverman.

Silverman was a bullshit artist who catered to the lowest common denominator but for the first part of his career possessed enough savvy to find talented creators and not interfere too much.

He frequently repeated his catchphrase to anyone within earshot:  “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.”

He didn’t like it when I pointed out that selling the sizzle was fine -- but you still needed to deliver a steak.

Silverman’s star was not merely setting at the time of The Mighty Orbots, it had collapsed into a black hole.  Despite being the only person to head all three networks, after his success at CBS and ABC, he made a gawdawful mess of NBC and left the peacock to “go into independent production.”*

None of Silverman’s indie-prods ever caught fire (though a few of them should and their cast and crews would have willing supplied the matches).  The Mighty Orbots was Silverman’s attempt to prove he was still the kid-vid genius who okayed Scooby-doo, Where Are You? and launched Joe Ruby and Ken Spears studio.

Perhaps it would have been better if we used translators in our Silverman meetings; speaking the same language certainly seemed futile.

The epitome of this was an epic battle Michael and I had with Silverman over how to get rid of a magnetic monster in one episode.

“I wanna throw it in a glacier,” Silverman said.

That wouldn’t work, Michael and I pointed out.  Intense cold strengthens a magnetic field, intense heat destroys it.  “Throw it in a volcano instead,” Michael said.

“No, I want to throw it in a glacier,” Silverman said.

Now some of you may wonder why fight over this minor point. 

I mean, it’s only a dumb children’s show, right?

Wrong.

There’s a saying in the music biz that if you don’t play every gig as if it were a sold out gig, you’ll never play a sold out gig.

Michael (and myself, and Steve Gerber, and Marty Pasko, and Flint Dille, and many of the other animation writers of our generation) would never short change our audience no matter how young they might be.

We fought long and hard to make our scripts as good as they could possibly be, pushing the format bit by bit, inch by inch, edit by edit a little further along the path.

We may have been the despair of the producers and studios who hired us, but with no false modesty our efforts paid off in shows that people remember fondly to this day, shows that made groundbreaking shows of the 1990s and 2000s easier to fight for.

Those screaming arguments Michael fought with Silverman and others to keep the integrity of his scripts paid off, if not for him then certainly for the shows he wrote for.

Case in point:  Dungeons & Dragons.

Michael wrote several of the best episodes of the show, which by Saturday morning standards of that era was a big hit, enjoying three seasons.

But when it was cancelled without wrapping up the main quest (i.e., the kid heroes finding their way back into the real world), Michael took it upon himself to write “Requiem”, a finale episode he made available to anyone who wanted to read it (eventually it was recorded by fans as an audio drama and that recording turned into a fan-imation by using scenes from other episodes).

Michael fought for writers’ rights and was instrumental in a couple of attempts to break animation writers away from the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists and into either the Writers’ Guild or, when that failed, to start an Animation Writers Guild.  He wrote / co-wrote / edited nearly 30 books, dozens of short stories, three feature films, plus more animation than IMDb gives him credit for.

I tried to recruit him for G.I. Joe but he refused, saying his action-adventure cred he couldn’t bring himself to write a show that glorified military force.

We respected him for that, and got him to write for Transformers, Jem, and My Little Pony.

He was a prickly sort, no denying that, but he was also the kind of guy you could trust to have your back in a story conference or a bar fight.  He was married for several years to Brynne Chandler, a talented writer and editor on her own, and for a while they were happy.  Among the children they had is Mallory Reaves, who continues the family tradition of writing and editing.

The end of their marriage and Michael’s subsequent diagnosis with Parkinson’s did a lot to simmer him down.

As Harlan himself demonstrated, you can’t roar through life full tilt 24 / 7 without burning out eventually.   Michael’s personal situation and health issues didn’t daunt his creative endeavors, but they sure took a lot of piss and vinegar out of him.

We stayed in touch as he went through a prolonged period of couch surfing.  He remained creative as long as he could operate a keyboard, but the Parkinson’s deprived him of speech.

The last time I saw him was at the Motion Picture home where a producer staged a table read for a new screenplay Michael had written.  He could barely raise his voice above a whisper at that point.

He remained online for a few years after that, but the last thing he wrote on Facebook was a brief mention of our mutual friend Marty Pasko’s death.  After that he put up a few links, but apparently even that become too much effort.

There are a few people in the industry that I’ve felt a special kinship with, and Michael was one of them.

It hurts to realize he’s gone.

  © Buzz Dixon

  *  If Daily Variety reports you’re going into independent production, it means you’re fired.  If they report you’re going to write a book, it means you’re really fired.

[awkwardpariah]

The Insurgency: After the MAGA regime fell in November of 2031 a crop of secessionist states and terrorist organizations rose from the Ashes. Most fell mere months after their formation like the Christian Republic centered in Western Nebraska and the 2nd Texas Republic around Amarillo. However, some groups managed to hold out for years. The most infamous: the American Redoubt in the Northern Rockies. Founded by the most extreme elements of the NDF and the Atomwaffen terrorist organization, they managed to keep fighting a guerilla war for 4 years thanks to their massive stockpiles of small arms. The Other War: When AOC took office, most people expected her Green New Deal to be shelved in favor of a more pragmatic, i.e. oil based, war economy. By 2032 her decision was paying real dividends. With so many oil, gas, and coal sources behind enemy lines, modernizing the country's energy grid not only proved essential to war production, but kicked off an economic boom in the Southwest, a region rapidly becoming known as the new "World's Factory." But an unlikely hero in the fight for climate change was the fledgling algae farming industry. Once limited to a handful of small sites in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the country's need for a reliable source of protein without land for livestock feed kickstarted a boom in the demand for genetically modified algae derived proteins. By 2032 once empty desert in California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado were blanketed in algae greenhouses that not only provided a stable source of food, but also extracted a good deal of CO2 from the air, and increased the Earth's albedo, cooling the planet. The Big Linkup: After 3 years of fighting, and the hard slog across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, Army Groups East and West meet at Burlington, Colorado. For most people, this signals the end of the war, and indeed it does for the government as well. Both army groups will reduce in size considerably, and the conflict against the insurgents will transition over to a primarily counter-terrorist campaign against the insurgent cells. Air power and special forces units will do the bulk of the fighting from now on. Election 2032: There was no question about AOC seeking a 2nd term, and after the collapse of the MAGA regime, the idea of challenging her for the nomination seemed absurd. By the Democratic National Convention, AOC was at the height of her power and used it to finally dump Pete Buttigieg and nominate a strong VP that wouldn't try to undermine her: Senate Finance Committee Chair Katie Porter. The National Union Party puts up Utah Governor Joel Ferry, one of the few National Union Green New Dealers. The National Union Party makes a strong showing among suburban voters who are still no fans of AOC's progressive agenda, particularly with regard to her war on their portfolios, but ultimately the President wins her re-election bid thanks to the success in the war and on crafting a strong social safety-net. Crafting a New Order: 2033 is a year for ends and new beginnings. Mitt Romney dies at 86 in the middle of his third Senate term. The Senator leaves behind a legacy as the leader of the wartime loyal opposition, and in many ways the last man to carry Ronald Reagan's torch. Not long after Romney's death, Congress passes the 29th Amendment to the Constitution, which establishes informed consent and in effect bodily autonomy, an unalienable right. By Summer, those who tried to destroy those rights are charged with high treason and crimes against humanity. To cap off the year, Donald Trump Sr. is taken off life support. The former President had been brain dead for almost 3 years, kept alive by his family to maintain their legitimacy as leaders of the MAGA movement. Artemis VI: In 2029, Artemis VI lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying six astronauts to the Gateway station and then onto Shackleton Base in the Lunar South Pole. The mission was the final flight of the SLS rocket, rushed into service before the Cape was completely surrounded by the NDF. The crew had a single assignment: mine as much water ice as was possible to keep the newly nationalized fleet of on-orbit servicing satellites, and by extension every other satellite, fueled and flying for the duration of the war. The Rebs captured the team at Kennedy Space Center, and the 2030 hurricane season trashed the Cape. No further launches could be safely conducted beyond small supply flights out of Wallops until 2034. When the Artemis 6 returned to Earth their bodies were frail, having lost muscle and bone density. But radiation damage was minimal thanks to their decision to move Shackleton into a nearby lunar lava tube. VA Day: On May 26, 2035 the town of Salmon, Idaho was completely destroyed by a combined air an artillery campaign that had been going on for a week. Salmon was the last hold out of the American Redoubt terrorist state, and its destruction finally brought Victory in America. VA Day was, in practice, a technicality. The Redoubt hadn't been able to threaten anyone outside of the Idaho panhandle for over a year, and for 4 years the insurgency had been limited to the Rockies and Appalachia. But on that day Americans everywhere celebrated the end of the bloodiest war in our country's history. Almost 9 million people had died, 2.5% of the population. 50 million people had been displaced and the war had cost the country trillions to bring to a close. Justice was still being sought by those who suffered under the MAGA regime, with Congress finally agreeing to hold a vote on the proposed War Reparations bonus to the UBI system. But for many, the debt of the war can never be paid. New Normal: With the war over Congress sets out to keep the victory they fought so hard for. A new amendment is sent to the still readmitting states for ratification, one that would give Congress the power to regulate redistricting, campaign finance, and places the country under a Ranked Choice/Popular Vote system for all elected offices, including the President. Meanwhile, the government also struggles to right many wrongs of the war, particularly with regard to the million or so Americans still displaced from the War. With the elections of 2036 on the horizon, nobody wants to be held responsible for making hard decisions. But at least one more is made with Congress agreeing not to repeat the mistakes of the past and to simply assume the war debts of the rebel states, rather than consigning them to financial ruin. <-Part III  \ Part IV

[canchewread]

Editor’s note: Bookish Bits is a regular literary writing column on Can’t You Read. Featuring both traditional book reviews, and expanded essays, this book blog encompasses all of my writing about the volumes in my extensive library.

Birdwatching With Liberal Antifascism: A Review of “How Fascism Works: the Politics of Us and Them” by Jason Stanley.

If you've been reading my anti-fascist analysis long enough, you'll know that I'm often quite critical of the imagined efforts of "liberal antifascists" in the Pig Empire. This is in part because foundationally, it's awfully hard to be an effective antifascist without also being an anticapitalist. It has also been my experience however that affluent liberals in positions of actual power are often far less interested in fighting fascists, than protecting their own wealth; if forced to choose between the two, they will quickly abandon all pretenses at opposing the fascist creep and side with hierarchal capitalist power to the bitter end. There is after all a reason I refer to this as our collective "Weimar America" period.

How then are we to approach an intelligent, well-read, genuinely sincere liberal antifascist? Even more perplexing, what does a reasonable observer do when this sincere liberal antifascist has produced what amounts to a fantastic birdwatching guide that allows even small children to recognize fascist politics in action, but offers up only vaguely reformist solutions that flatly will not stop the fascist creep? In short, how do we address a book like Jason Stanley's 2018 work "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them?" In the end, I've decided that the only honest way forward is to critique what Stanley's book is, rather than focus on what it is not.

So what is it? Expressed simply, How Fascism Works is a collection and analysis of ten objectively fascist political tactics being used to seize control by contemporary far right, ultranationalist movements across the Pig Empire. A study of both rhetoric and process, the author's work isn't about fascist governments, so much as the political movements that put them in power. Although Stanley does spend some time discussing twentieth-century fascist regimes like the Nazis in Germany, or Mussolini's fascist Italy, his focus is very much in the here and now, along with the type of reactionary, eliminationist politics that empowered leaders such as Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and of course Donald Trump in America.

Just what are these fascist political techniques? Stanley identifies them as a call to a "mythic past," inverted reactionary "propaganda," fervent "anti-intellectualism," the enforcement of "unreality," insistence on the existence of a natural "hierarchy," imagined "victimhood," rigid enforcement of authoritarian "law and order," manipulation of "sexual anxiety," casting internal lifestyle differences in the mold of "Sodom and Gomorrah," and otherized presumptions about work ethic and productive value to society. Although each of these pillars are individually present in all types of reactionary politics across the Pig Empire; taken together, they represent clear evidence of a fascist movement in progress - which is the best time to identify fascism; since once it's no longer a fascist movement, but rather a fascist regime, it's far too late to stop it.

Within the narrow, but still relevant confines of studying fascist political practices on the path to power in a faux liberal democracy, I'd have to say How Fascism Works is a smashing success. Drawing heavily from thinkers like Eco, Adorno, and Arendt, Stanley's analysis highlights not only the practices of fascist politicians, but also why they're so effective in convincing the classic "authoritarian personality" type to surrender all autonomy, and indeed rational thought, to fascist charlatans and strongmen. In this regard, Stanley's book might more accurately be called "How Fascism Works (on bootlickers, to dismantle capitalist faux democracies)" instead. Still, for folks primarily concerned with the practical realities of identifying modern fascist movements, and unwinding their poisonous political arguments, How Fascism Works will definitely deliver the goods.

Which unfortunately brings us to the pushback against Stanley's work, and why How Fascism Works is simultaneously a valuable resource, and a dangerous diversion from effective antifascist practices. While many reactionary observers have criticized Stanley for failing to define what fascism is; I don't think that critique is accurate or in good faith. Stanley does define fascism in a purely political context; wingers simply don't like that his definition accurately describes their current political practices. The author clearly states he's not talking about the policies of established regimes, or even the ideology of fascist movements, but rather their methods of acquiring power; you can't crush a guy for failing to write the book you would have preferred to read, and I don't give two wet horse apples whether or not American fascists dislike a Yale professor calling them, well, fascists.

Perhaps more surprisingly however, How Fascism Works has also drawn criticism from some antifascists; particularly those like myself, who largely agree with Trotsky's analysis about what fascism really is, and why it is unleashed by the ruling classes in a liberal democratic society that appears more free than it is. There is literally no anticapitalist component to either Stanley's analysis, or his wholly inadequate proposed solutions; which more or less boil down to "liberal politicians need to be better true liberals and we all need to vote harder to protect our democratic institutions." The end result is in effect a wonderful book about types of nazi birds, and the modern habits of those birds, without much discussion of why the birds are there and what to do if they're trying to kill you for capitalists and hierarchal power.

Does that ultimately matter? Well, that depends on what you want a book like How Fascism Works to accomplish. In light of its widespread popularity, I would say it has been an effective part of the mainstream discourse that has finally at this late a date, allowed liberals to accurately describe the American right's current evolution as fascist; albeit, tepidly so. By that same measure, Stanley's insistence that the liberal democratic order that birthed this fascist movement is the only answer to the problem, probably hasn't helped many of those people become effective antifascists; as evidenced by the fact that Joe Biden has been president for almost two years, and American fascism is still growing politically stronger by the day.

In the final analysis, all of this makes Stanley's How Fascism Works a wonderfully written, extremely informative "birdwatching" book for liberals who'd like to be antifascists, but don't know how to spot and resist the fascist propaganda all around them. If you're looking for an accessible way to get your Dem-voting Auntie who really misses the quiet dignity of bygone liberal politicians like Bobby Kennedy, or John Lewis, onside in the war against contemporary fascism, this is probably the book you want to buy for her. If on the other hand you're looking for a deep theory discussion about why capitalist societies are always capable of turning fascist at any moment, and how we can stamp out the serpent of violent reaction forever; this book doesn't have a whole lot to offer you.

On the basis that you can't punish a book for failing to be something it never promised you in the first place, I'm going to give How Fascism Works three and a half stars. Although I acknowledge that Stanley's work here is excellent, his ideological concessions to capitalist realism make it impossible to call this great antifascist scholarship. Plus I felt obligated to dock him a half star for excessive West Wing-esque rhapsodizing about liberal democratic institutions that can't stop fascism; because they were designed by, and are controlled by, reactionary capitalists who prefer fascism to sharing.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook.

Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones. It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”

Note: Real G.D.P. adjusted for inflation and seasonal fluctuations.·Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under Republicans, according to a Times analysis. In more concrete terms: The average income of Americans would be more than double its current level if the economy had somehow grown at the Democratic rate for all of the past nine decades. If anything, that period (which is based on data availability) is too kind to Republicans, because it excludes the portion of the Great Depression that happened on Herbert Hoover’s watch. The six presidents who have presided over the fastest job growth have all been Democrats, as you can see above. The four presidents who have presided over the slowest growth have all been Republicans. The big question, of course, is why. And there are not easy answers.

I have shown the data to multiple economists in recent weeks, and most say they are not sure how to explain it, at least not fully. “We don’t quite get why it’s the case,” Katherine Eriksson, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in economic history, told me. Marianne Wanamaker, an economist at the University of Tennessee, described the pattern to the graduate students in a class she teaches and asked for their thoughts. “They were sort of stumped,” she said. Part of the answer surely involves coincidence. Some presidents, like Barack Obama and George W. Bush, take office when the economy is in a downturn, while others, like Harry Truman and Donald Trump, inherit a boom. Some, like Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, preside over military buildups; others, like Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton, drawdowns. More broadly, the economy’s performance stems from millions of decisions made every day by businesses and consumers, many of which have little relation to government policy.

Still, the pattern is so strong and long-lasting that coincidence alone is unlikely to be the only explanation. Statistical noise, as Mr. Blinder and Mr. Watson wrote in their paper exploring the pattern, does not seem to be the answer.

[NYTimes]

[trkstrnd]

in the spirit of the new year i am going to post some controversial takes

as of january first 2023 i feel

-ice is a social construct

-fancams are edits but edits are not fan cams

-capitalism is a concept fed to people by power hungry politicians who want you to believe that giving everything to keep them in power is better than living a safe, secure life.

-socialism is the way to go.

-dogs are better than cats but only by the tiniest morsel of a whisker upon their fluffy little faces and both are infinitely better than humans

-all reptiles are friend shaped. we just need to be able to read body language.

-insulin should be free (sincerely, a diabetic)

-garlic salt is a completely valid seasoning

-garlic is best vegetable

-vampires need to come up with a vaccine for garlic aversion

-garlic

-rafael silva and sierra mcclain carry 911 lone star on their backs

-tarlos > buddie

-but buddie is cool too

-be kind to each other

-diet cherry coke needs to go back into production

-cool colors are prettier than warm colors

-my friends are the coolest

-lettuce is the worst, most heinous, unethical food to create even in a world with the cattle industry

-climate change is real

-even if you don’t believe it’s real there is quite literally no reason to keep not caring about the environment around you

-like i’m not picking up trash at the park solely because of climate change im picking it up bc the animals might get hurt and it is not aesthetically pleasing

-abolish straws

-or at least just make them a medical supply

-some disabled people need them and that is okay but u don’t need them bestie just lift ur cup

-wood is a better material than plastic to make dishes from.

-small businesses are so good

-only buy from amazon if you need to.

-the extra shipping and time is worth it to help people who need your sales

-billionaires are inherently evil

-and no that is not jealousy

-the ‘american dream’ relies on gentrification

-if you can act, look, sound, like a white man you’ll be successful

-equal opportunity is bullshit

-fatphobia is real

-over the ear headphones > in ear

-ibuprofen is the superior pain relief medication

-flautas are exquisite

-there should be an age cap on all held government positions

-seriously george bush bill clinton and donald trump were all born in the same year, joe biden before them and have held office for the past twenty years

-stop letting people born in the 1940s run a country in 2023

-queer people aren’t indoctrinating your kids. your kids are finding safe spaces.

-dragons are fuckin cool

-let people be who they want to be as long as they don’t harm anyone.

-sharks are BAD ASS

-fish are friends AND food

-good, authentic sushi is worth the investment

-the world has nuance

-sometimes nuance is hard to understand especially to neurodivergent people

-please explain the nuance instead of attacking people who may not get it.

-music has both evolved and devolved

-carlos reyes is autistic.

-autism isn’t a bad thing

-autism speaks is an inherently terrible organization that supports eugenics.

-most addicts, if not all of them, do not choose to be addicts

-let people be people

-be a kind person

-thank you

-i love you all

[90363462]

Opinion: The damage Kanye West is doing is devastating

3:47 PM EDT November 2, 2022

Editor's Note: Bill Carter, a media analyst for CNN, covered the television industry for The New York Times for 25 years, and has written four books on TV, including The Late Shift and The War for Late Night. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

The toxic infection from Kanye West's antisemitic comments is spreading.

O n Saturday, an antisemitic message scrolled across the outside of TIAA Bank Field in Jacksonville, Florida during a college football game. The message read: "Kanye is right about the jews." The same message was later flashed on a building in Jacksonville Saturday night. 

And that same weekend, drivers in Jacksonville were treated to ugly antisemitic signs on a highway overpass -- similar to what happened in Los Angeles a week before. 

Antisemitism is endemic, and it's being inflamed by a wide range of hate sites online. But there's no question that West, a figure with a massive cultural footprint, has stoked the never fully extinguished flames of hate directed at Jewish people. 

Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has said Jewish people have too much control over the business world. He threatened in a Twitter post to "Go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE." He ranted in an Instagram post about Ari Emanuel, CEO of the talent agency Endeavor, referencing "business" people when he clearly meant Jews. 

Last Friday, he told paparazzi that his mental health issues had been misdiagnosed by a Jewish doctor, made reference to Jewish ownership of media and compared Planned Parenthood to the Holocaust.

West is an intelligent guy; he knows what he's doing. That's what makes all of this so awful, and so dangerous. Dismissing him as a self-important gadfly, or a creature of the tabloids associated with Kardashian nonsense, severely underestimates who Kanye West is. 

He has sold well over 100 million records; he has won 24 Grammy Awards; and he has been taken seriously in a range of businesses, including music production, talent management and especially fashion design. His successes in those areas have afforded him prodigious reach among younger consumers of music and clothes. 

Certainly his inflammatory rhetoric has ignited a substantial backlash from people horrified by West's bigotry, which has been directed at others along with Jews. (He has also said slavery is a choice and wore a "White Lives Matter" t-shirt.)

But there is an undercurrent to the reaction to West -- a dismissive one that seems to find his views unserious in some way, because West is an "entertainer," a guy who used to be married to a Kardashian; or because he may have genuine mental health issues. 

And then there is West's position within the cocoon of conservative media: a Hollywood figure who wears MAGA hats and frequently shares views with the right-wing base. 

Donald Trump still hasn't publicly disavowed West. The most he's added about the anti-Semitic comments is a weirdly phrased, "He's made some ... rough statements on Jewish." 

Fox News aired an interview between West and its highly controversial host, Tucker Carlson, where West said that Jared Kushner, who is Jewish, only tried to negotiate peace in the Middle East "to make money." The network edited out West's most antisemitic attacks. Those comments only became public because someone of conscience inside Fox decided to leak them. 

For all those reasons, the chorus of outrage about West's disgusting attack on Jews was for many days muted -- even factoring in the businesses that severed relationships with him. Some underplayed the impact of someone as big and famous as Kanye West diving into the ugliness of bias, despite the fact that there already has been a sustained surge of antisemitic comments in alt-right online communities.

All this has made West's almost casual slurring of Jews all the more appalling. There is a scary electrical charge of intolerance in the air, and a cultural icon has decided not only to touch the live wire, but to hang it around his neck, wave it around, and run it up the flagpole of his fame. 

The brands that have abandoned him are saying this kind of intolerance is unacceptable. That's the right response. 

But the message West has been spouting is still resonating in dark and nasty places, including with those who decided to celebrate West's validating their pathetic prejudices by displaying support for him at football stadiums and highway overpasses. 

Some of those guys may have no clue about the desecration of humanity they are celebrating -- and looking to bring back. 

West almost surely does. He may only care about the damage his continuing disinclination to acknowledge he's a bigot is doing to his once-bulging bankroll. The cost to the people he's denigrating may be much more harmful. 

© 2022 Cable News Network, Inc. A WarnerMedia Company. All Rights Reserved.

[dankusner]

OPINION

Civil Rights Act required bipartisan spirit

60th anniversary is time to reflect on progress, persistent inequalities

As if the past few years have not already been among some of the most volatile and stressful since the 1960s, the last 30 days with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump and the sudden announcement that President Joe Biden is no longer seeking reelection only further reinforce that feeling.

Unfortunately, these events also obscure the 60th commemoration of one of the 1960s’ most significant accomplishments: the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In fact, an appearance at a commemoration event by Biden this week at the LBJ Library in Austin was originally postponed because of the attempt on Trump’s life.

That the 60th anniversary of the 1964 Act has been overlooked is quite understandable, but it is also lamentable.

Overnight, the Civil Rights Act immediately affected millions of Americans, both white and Black, and changed the entire racial landscape of the nation by outlawing employment discrimination and the segregation of public accommodations.

At long last, the doors to millions of employment opportunities were finally opened and what could be construed as perhaps one of the most basic of courtesies — to be allowed to drink, for instance, out of whatever water fountain one desired — was finally granted.

The results of this act have been undeniable.

Black poverty has declined by one-third. A Black middle class commensurate with the proportion of the U.S. population being Black has emerged.

Acceptance of Black Americans across a variety of social interactions has occurred; public opinion pollsters no longer ask questions about views on interracial marriage or having a Black neighbor, Black Americans have been elected mayors in cities that are not predominantly Black, and they appear as spokespeople in commercials for products ranging from cereal to credit unions.

What can be achieved

It is probably safe to say that the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prevented years of racial violence that would have made 1967’s rioting look inconsequential and prevented the U.S. from becoming an international pariah at a time when the Cold War was actively being contested.

The law also provides us with an example of what can be achieved when Republicans and Democrats work together.

It is important to understand that despite President Lyndon B. Johnson’s legendary legislative powers, the 1964 act would not have passed if a majority of the Republicans in the House and the Senate had not voted for it.

Similarly, none of the other great Civil Rights laws of the 1960s, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, would have passed without strong Republican involvement.

Yet, while we should openly celebrate the 60th anniversary of the 1964 act, we need to be aware that, in many respects, the act has become a victim of its own success.

Because of the progress that it has achieved, many people believe that the war on racism has now been won and existing measures are no longer needed.

Public opinion polls, for example, show that the percentage of whites who believe that Black Americans have the same opportunities and receive the same treatment as whites is consistently twice that of Black people.

Other polls show that about one-half of whites believe they are now more discriminated against.

This is unfortunate because, for all of the progress over the past 60 years, we still have not completely eliminated the “two societies, one Black, one white — separate and unequal” that the Kerner Report warned us about in 1968.

Black unemployment remains twice that of white unemployment, unarmed Black people are shot by police at a rate that is three times higher than for whites, and Black median income is only about 60% of white median income.

This misunderstanding may also create an unjustified sense of complacency and cause us to not be as watchful as we should be, which may, in turn, ultimately affect all of us, regardless of race.

Subtle erosion

History has shown that rights are not “given,” that they must be demanded.

The abolitionist and the suffragette movements and our very own American Revolution demonstrate this.

The corollary to this is also true:

Once finally obtained, rights cannot be taken for granted; otherwise, they can be taken away. Just as a shoreline can gradually disappear by years of subtle erosion, the same can happen to rights.

We need to be aware, for instance, of how new laws, proposals and court decisions affect things that we may routinely take for granted, such as privacy, who can vote, how and when, and what can be taught in schools.

So let us take the opportunities and the lessons that the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act now provide us with:

A recognition that we have come far and should be proud, but that consequences from centuries past still remain; a recognition that we must be involved and that we all must vote; and a recognition that we can achieve great things if we are willing to work together.

This last point is especially important.

We must return to the days when compromise was not a “dirty” word, when our elected officials truly sought to solve problems rather than seemingly prefer to score political points, and when they did not call each other “racist” or “socialist.”

We know there will always be differences, but as Johnson said in his first address before Congress as president — the same address in which he urged the swift passage of what became the 1964 Civil Rights Act — this is not necessarily a failing: “Our American unity does not depend upon unanimity. We have differences; but now, as in the past, we can derive from these differences strength, not weakness; wisdom, not despair.”

The 1964 Civil Rights Act helped change us for the better 60 years ago. Now, in another turbulent time, it can do that again.